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Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (Editor),

Heather Anne Swanson (Editor),

Elaine Gan (Editor),

Nils Bubandt (Editor)

4.41 · Rating details · 280 ratings · 32 reviews

Living on a damaged planet challenges who we are and where we live. This timely anthology calls on twenty eminent humanists and scientists to revitalize curiosity, observation, and transdisciplinary conversation about life on earth.

As human-induced environmental change threatens multispecies livability, Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet puts forward a bold proposal: entan ...more

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Paperback, 352 pages

Published May 30th 2017 by University of Minnesota Press

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Aug 26, 2019 Kathleen rated it it was amazing

Every essay in here is worth a read, but this is from the especially brillaint “Shimmer: When All You Love is Being Trashed” by Deborah Bird Rose:

“To act as if the world beyond humans is composed of ‘things’ for human use is a catastrophic assault on the diversity, complexity, abundance, and beauty of life” (G55)

“The legacies of Western mechanism have manifested through repeated assertions of human exceptionalism—that man is the only animal to make tools; that man is the only animal with languag Every essay in here is worth a read, but this is from the especially brillaint “Shimmer: When All You Love is Being Trashed” by Deborah Bird Rose:

“To act as if the world beyond humans is composed of ‘things’ for human use is a catastrophic assault on the diversity, complexity, abundance, and beauty of life” (G55)

“The legacies of Western mechanism have manifested through repeated assertions of human exceptionalism—that man is the only animal to make tools; that man is the only animal with language, a sense of fairness, generosity, laughter; that man is the only mindful creature. On one hand, all of these claims to exceptionalism have been thoroughly undermined. Other beings also do wonderful and clever things; we are not a unique outlier but rather are part of various continua. On the other hand, however, the term Anthropocene reminds us that it is not yet time to jettison a sense of human exceptionalism. Instead, by foregrounding the exceptional damage that humans are causing, the Anthropocene shows us the need for radically reworked forms of attention to what marks the human species as different” (G55).

“In an ecologically attentive recursion, we find that man is the only animal to voraciously, relentlessly, and viciously wreck the lifeworld of earth. Man is the only animal to systematically torture members of its own species, as well as members of countless other species, and to engage in seemingly endless and often wildly indiscriminate killing” (G55).

“A recent example of violence comes from an event in the northern Australian town of Charter Towers in December 2013. A group of residents had complained for some time about the maternity camp of flying foxes in a municipal park. In their view, the creatures were ‘pests.’ And so they organized and conducted an assault. It happened with local government approval; in no way was it a dirty little secret. The assault showed us (yet again) that man is the only animal that attacks defenseless creature with smoke, water cannons, and firecrackers; that uses helicopters to fly low so as to terrify flying foxes and create downdrafts that break their wing bones. Man is the only animal that shoots other creatures with paintball guns, and when the creatures flap around in terror or fall to the ground injured and in shock, man is the only animal that cheers” (G56). AND “This portrait of human cruelty is as one-sided as were earlier accounts of our wondrous superiority. But when we highlight the pitiless and destructive qualities of humans, we see the desperate need to find ways to recuperate rational and mutually beneficial sides of the story about who we are and of what we are capable” (G56)

“So care is an ethical response involving tenderness, generosity, and compassion, and care is an ongoing assumption of responsibility in the face of continuing violence and peril” (G58).

“In this time of extinctions, we are going to be asked again and again to take a stand for life, and this means taking a stand for faith in life’s meaningfulness” (G61). ...more

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Jul 20, 2018 Rogier Boers rated it it was amazing

Shelves: philosophy, social-issues-racism-feminism-etc, science, history

I am enthousiastically reading a wonderful book called Art of Living on a Damaged Planet (Anna Tsing and others, 2017). It is an interesting collection of scientific, philosophical, as well as artistic, anecdotal and feminist essays on the impact of homo sapiens on life on earth, of which -of course- we are part.

I am happy with the book, but I do think the goal the book sets itself (by telling 'entangled histories, situated narratives, and thick descriptions' creating arts of living and eventual ...more

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Jan 07, 2018 Makenzie rated it it was amazing

Riveting collection of multidisciplinary, experimental essays about living in the late stages of earth as we know it. This is a beautiful book containing two volumes and full of illustrations and pictures. "Monsters" is about symbiosis, the microbiome, and parasites; "Ghosts" is more overtly concerned with destruction of the earth and it's systems. ...more

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Jul 12, 2018 Mel rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: insects, non-fiction, science-stuff, some-of-my-best-reads, utopia-or-dystopia, read-in-2018

This was a fascinating book. I really enjoyed it even though it was quite academically written and some of it probably went over my head. Fascinating topics and essays.

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May 10, 2017 Bonnye Reed marked it as to-read

Shelves: netgalley-could-not-finish

I received a free electronic copy of this interesting collections of essays from Netgalley, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, and University of Minnesota Press in exchange for an honest review. Thank you all, for sharing your hard work with me.

PUb date May 30, 2017

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Sep 08, 2017 Jeff rated it it was amazing

This book is really fucking sweet and is a must-read for anyone looking to grapple what caring about the environment can or should look like in the Anthropocene. It'll make you reimagine what's possible, and what could possibly be cooler? ...more

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Jun 17, 2018 Rhys rated it really liked it

An interesting, even eclectic, group of essays that somehow suggest that not all ladders lead to humans.

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Dec 16, 2020 Jacob Wren rated it it was amazing

Three passages from Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet:

*

In a 1963 Warner Brothers cartoon featuring Ralph E. Wolf and Sam Sheepdog – originally created by Chuck Jones (in 1953) then remade by ex-Jones animators Phil Monroe and Richard Thompson – a wolf and a sheepdog share a companionable dailiness and friendship involving coffee together in the morning and a return home arm in arm at the end of the day. In between, of course, they assume their roles as enemies: the sheepdog guards the flock, wh Three passages from Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet:

*

In a 1963 Warner Brothers cartoon featuring Ralph E. Wolf and Sam Sheepdog – originally created by Chuck Jones (in 1953) then remade by ex-Jones animators Phil Monroe and Richard Thompson – a wolf and a sheepdog share a companionable dailiness and friendship involving coffee together in the morning and a return home arm in arm at the end of the day. In between, of course, they assume their roles as enemies: the sheepdog guards the flock, while the wolf devises numerous stratagems to steal the sheep, foiled at every turn by a seemingly dopey yet powerful and alert guard dog. The cartoon, with its reference to the workaday world, cleverly points to the human cultural roles within which dog and wolf are forced to play out their opposed roles and marks as capital the framework for their opposition. There is an invisible boss and a system within which they must perform: someone – presumably human – owns the flock, and both are employed in its maintenance and devastation. The cartoon is knowing and innovative in that it remarks on the “insiderness” to human culture of the wolf – he is supposed to try to try to steal the sheep, although, in this fort-da of mastery and triumph over trauma, he will never succeed. Instead, his actions confirm and reconfirm the superior agency of the human creation: the sheepdog. Not matter how much the thief tries to bring down the empire, he is foiled. Part of the critique this cartoon offers is to assert that the economic system of private property and primitive accumulation requires an enemy.
– Carla Freccero, Wolf, or Homo Homini Lupus

*

The study of collective behavior so far has focused on identifying the algorithms, or rules, that connect individuals to produce outcomes for the group. There are unresolved philosophical questions about what it means to understand collective behavior. Biologists have struggled for centuries between two alternatives, a struggle that continues because both alternatives are incorrect. One option is that each individual, ant or cell, is working independently off an internal program, currently envisaged as a sort of computer program contained in, created, and carried out by genes, and that all of these independent actions add up to make the organism, or colony, or tissue. The other is that there is another entity at the level of the whole system, such as the embryo, or superorganism, that somehow drives the relations among the individual entities. We need to develop new language and sets of metaphors that avoid both of these alternatives and instead describe collective behaviour as a tangle of overlapping connections that is constantly being created, without any locus of control.
– Deborah M. Gordon, Without Planning: The Evolution of Collective Behaviour in Ant Colonies

*

In Kupny’s lifetime, Soviet socialist modernization delivered a great deal. It put an end to illiteracy, epidemics, and famine, while cleaning up daily life with indoor plumbing, public bathhouses, and central heating. Socialism also enriched life with pensions, paid vacations, affordable housing, free health care and education, and an impressive network of libraries, theatres, concert halls, and clubs. The socialist state lavished this attention foremost on trained, urban, blue-collar workers like Kupny, while outwardly focusing political rhetoric on equality and the ascendance of the working class. The contrasts in 2014 with the past were stark. In postsocialist, post-shock-capitalism society, working classes have been left in chronic poverty and joblessness, while pensions have evaporated, paid vacations are a nostalgic memory, and equality – well, no one thinks about equality anymore. On this panorama, the achievements of the Soviet technocratic planning state look better and better.
– Kate Brown, Marie Curie’s Fingerprint: Nuclear Spelunking in the Chernobyl Zone
...more

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Sep 05, 2020 Easton Smith rated it it was amazing

It's rare that I read anything more academic than the news these days, but I'm glad I did dive into this book of monsters and ghosts. So many of the central ideas of these essays--that there is no individual per se, that the 'human' and 'natural' worlds are becoming indistinguishable, that we are all going to hell in this handbasket together and that doesn't mean it isn't beautiful--resonate with me deeply, while also providing glimpses of specificity. I loved the work exploring Chernobyl, the d ...more

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Dec 29, 2019 leni terese rated it really liked it

Shelves: university, environment, non-fiction, master-thesis

Eye-opening and important. I think I will use this book for my master thesis.

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Nov 30, 2018 Eliza rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Although i read It almost by accident, this was a fascinating book. First, I devoured the excellently written double introductions (ghosts + monsters), as well as the wonderful double Codas. Then I surprisingly found myself reading most of the articles. I say surprisingly, because I am an architect, interested in the narrative reading of science proposed in this book, but theoretically not that passionate about lichens life-span, geology of mud volcanoes, or bacterial cosmologies in the human bo ...more

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Sep 20, 2017 Daniel Casey rated it really liked it

Shelves: nonfiction

an exceptional anthology that moves in unexpected directions that are quite satisfying

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Dec 24, 2020 Sebastian rated it it was amazing

Shelves: faves

An absolutely fantastic collection of interdisciplinary writings which work to problematize concepts of individuality and linear "progress"—read both teleologically and purely temporally—through an engagement with novel theories in ecology, developmental/evolutionary biology, anthropology, etc.

Divided into two sections, the first deals with "ghosts"—essentially undertaking a hauntology of contemporary ecological landscapes, in an attempt to articulate the deep entanglements which produced them, An absolutely fantastic collection of interdisciplinary writings which work to problematize concepts of individuality and linear "progress"—read both teleologically and purely temporally—through an engagement with novel theories in ecology, developmental/evolutionary biology, anthropology, etc.

Divided into two sections, the first deals with "ghosts"—essentially undertaking a hauntology of contemporary ecological landscapes, in an attempt to articulate the deep entanglements which produced them, and the "ghosts" of past beings/ecosystems/ecologies/entanglements which still linger amongst them—echoes of a past which exceeds its categorization as such. The second half of the book deals with "monsters"—"bodies tumbled into bodies"—articulating the essential imbrications and encasements which define holobiont beings (that is, "symbiotic assemblages, at whatever scale of space or time, which are more like knots of diverse intra-active relatings in dynamic complex systems than like the entities of a biology made up of preexisting bounded units [genes, cells, organisms, etc.] in interactions that can be conceived only as competitive or cooperative," to quote Haraway's contribution to the volume; Lynn Margulis's work on symbiogenesis haunts the entire volume). In so doing, the essays in the book's latter half work to dissolve the arbitrary individuations imposed by modernity's advance and its fetish for proliferating categorization/reticulation, thus working, in the process, to outline new ways of "seeing" and of "noticing" which might make it possible for us to contend with ongoing ecological devastation not merely as a series of individuated extinctions, nor even as the collapse of interconnected "habitats" or "ecosystems", but rather as the ongoing transformation of a living substrate—a transformation which, rather than proceeding merely from flourishing to collapse, instead presents as the emergence of a new form of holobiont being, one with its own, freshly adapted/developed "arts of living." To quote a pair of authors who might seem odd companions to those collected herein: "Catastrophe is the past coming apart. Anastrophe is the future coming together. Seen from within history, divergence is reaching critical proportions. From the matrix, crisis is a convergence misinterpreted by mankind" (Plant & Land, "Cyberpositive"); to read the present ecological crisis not as the collapse of a stable system, but rather as its continuance through the convergence of a new form of being-with, is to read into disaster the seeds of a future yet-to-be (to engage that utopian impulse which Frederic Jameson finds inherent in the dialectical movement of human thought and its imaginary [see "Utopia as Replication," from Valences of the Dialectic]), a future which we, as humans—imbued with those very powers which have given rise to the present "catastrophe" in the first place—might be situated to "help along", in the process finding our own place within that future-yet-to-come and yet already-converging.

That said, I should close by noting that one of the most admirable qualities of this collection is its near-universal accessibility (in contrast to this review, I should note; "I didn't have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one"). The exceptions are all-too-predictable: Donna Haraway outlines some important concepts, but loses the plot a bit in trying to articulate them in terms of processes of artistic creation; Karen Barad brings her formidable intellectual talents to bear on an essay that feels more like an introduction to an unwritten book-to-be, than a contribution to the present collection (bar a broad thematic overlap). Aside from these few exceptions, however, the book is exceptionally inviting in how it's written, and its structure (introduction, sets of essays subdivided by interstitial commentaries which restate and refine the themes of the collection as a whole, each half closing with a coda which seeks to articulate "what is to be done" in light of the collected texts) helps ensure that the occasional outbreaks of poetic indulgence can serve their purpose of enlivening the text without obscuring the fundamental intentionality of the whole.

Highly recommended. One of the most stimulating and engaging books I've read in a while, and despite the name, hardly a collection I'd classify as either "depressive" or "pessimistic", nor as falling prey to a naïve optimism; rather, in reading disaster as possibility, collapse as emergence, catastrophe as anastrophe, and so on, it prods the reader to engage with the real collapse of present entanglements without falling prey to either nihilistic surrender or hopeless nostalgia. An important task, to say the least. ...more

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Jun 04, 2020 Jess rated it it was amazing

Collection of cross-disciplinary essays exploring the ‘monsters’ and ‘ghosts’ that have resulted from human impact in the environment. Style and topics cover a broad range but all essays are relatively quick Pulled a few quotes that stood out to me and that I think summarize these perspectives in the anthropocene well.

‘A world increasingly shaped by human activity but also increasingly outside of human control’ G171

‘Writers look for ways of reading landscape not as detached from humans but as d ...more

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Oct 19, 2020 Benjamin Felser rated it really liked it

A beautiful, scary, informative and mindset-altering assemblage of essays, stories and art-pieces from thinkers and activists across fields of the humanities (or posthumanities) and sciences. Beautiful thinking on where the heck to go from here. The main thing that's lacking is instruction beyond this mindset, which could be summarized as working towards multikinded (as opposed to multispecies) connection and unity. What does this look like in our lives? How can we create community with these co ...more

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Jan 17, 2021 Palo Hux rated it really liked it

A fascinating collection of essays that refuse easy categorization: from biology, to chemistry, physics, cultural and literary studies, "Arts of Living..." offers intrincate and intimate conversations with all non-human and human beings, dead or alive.
The "Ghosts" and "Monsters" sections often overlap, thus proving the overall thesis statement of the book: that easy splitting between categories/genres in an eerie, monstruous age of climate collapse and human-made catastrophes on a global scale ...more

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Jul 03, 2020 Lucas Miller rated it it was amazing

Really loved this, even if I didn't really grasp every essay. Some of the entries were just beyond my background knowledge, but for the most part the authors in this collection go to great lengths to make specialized knowledge universally applicable.

This book assuages a lot of climate doom with curiosity and calls to action. It was fascinated and will leave me thinking about it for a long time to come. ...more

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Apr 28, 2020 Bridget Pitt rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

This is a brilliant and thought provoking read on the condition of our planet, and ourselves within it. One to savour, and to read again and again. One of those books when you want to read every second sentence aloud to your best friends because it just so aptly captures the complexity of our world.

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Dec 12, 2017 Zach rated it it was amazing

An incredible (and honestly often mind-blowing) collection of multi-disciplinary essays on living fruitfully in our time, on a damaged planet. Poses questions worth puzzling over for some time to come.

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Apr 09, 2018 Fivel rated it liked it

I'm not a fan of academic writing. And this book is an anthology of mostly academic work. However, I think the subject matter is compelling and a few of the essays stand out as powerful pieces. I hope a similar book comes a long that's more accessible for a wider audience. ...more

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Oct 08, 2018 Andy rated it really liked it

Shelves: litcrit-and-crit-theory, philosophy

A weird and excellent book I bought on a whim. Very interesting design--it's double sided! Reading this felt like exploring new territory in landscape studies and ecology. Came at just the right time too, definitely informing my participation in my biogeography course this semester. ...more

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Feb 03, 2019 Genevieve Lambert rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

This book is confirming!

Life is changing. Reading others' "noticing" is inspiring. We are not autonomous. In how many ways we are not autonomous, is why I will refer back to this book. ...more

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Jul 09, 2020 Pandaduh rated it it was amazing

Read my review here: https://blackandwhitepandaduh.wordpre... ...more

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May 24, 2018 Robin Small rated it it was amazing

This book bridges the gap between science and fiction in new ways, so that both shed light on the other, and deepen our understanding of reality.
You have to read it.

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Nov 15, 2019 Tallon Kennedy rated it really liked it

Shelves: 21st-century-nonfiction-memoir-etc, thesis-theory, 2019

Spooky 7/10

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Nov 19, 2019 Lynette Dooley rated it liked it

I loved the chapter on collective behavior of ants and our ghosts of Chernobyl

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Mar 18, 2020 Olivia Funk rated it really liked it

I congratulate myself on the timeliness of this read, & brace myself as the sobering realities of our planet earth sink in ... lord have mercy

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Aug 16, 2020 Lukas Fraser rated it it was amazing

Such a vibeathon, made me rethink life

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Sep 06, 2020 amy rated it really liked it

Couldn't finish the Haraway chapter but otherwise liked the framework of ghosts (traces of the past) and monsters (hybrids & entanglements). ...more

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Feb 12, 2021 Alexandra Swanson rated it it was amazing

Profoundly though provoking, beautifully written! This should be mandatory reading for everyone.

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About Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

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Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-of-the-Way Place and coeditor of Uncertain Terms: Negotiating Gender in American Culture.